In my paper I examine the connection between memory and dissolve in The Dead, the final short story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. First I contrast the two types of memory presented in the two main characters of the story, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, with each other: mémoire volontaire and mémoire involontaire, visually and acoustically triggered memory. Then I analyse the end of the story where the expression ›dissolving‹ is used at a crucial point. In film editing the term ›dissolve‹ refers to a transition between two images: one image fades out–or dissolves–and is replaced by another image. Using an essay written by Patrick Roth as an example I extend the meaning of to dissolve to a mythological, psychological and cultural sense–as a superposition of life and death, the past and the present, consciousness and unconsciousness, form and material, author and work. Since Gabriel Conroy remembers the death of another figure in this passage, the hidden line between the world of the living and the dead becomes permeable.